What Are Little Boys Made Of?

In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.

Slouching Towards Kampala: Uganda’s Deadly Embrace of Hate

When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.

David Benkof: Behind the Mask

At first glance, David Benkof appears to be a young gay man who believes that same-sex marriage will damage the institution of marriage, that there are better options for gay couples than marriage, that the community should join him in prioritizing other more pressing issues, and that the marriage discussion is harming the efforts of gay couples in red states to get recognition for their unions. He also claims that he’s a gay columnist, that he speaks for an influential collection of gay thinkers, and that he is part of the gay and lesbian community and that he shares our goals and dreams. But none of that is true.

“Repeat After Me”: The Reparative Therapy Echo Chamber

The April 2008 edition of the pay-to-publish vanity journal Psychological Reports featured a new report from NARTH. Written by NARTH president A. Dean Byrd, past president Joseph Nicolosi, and Richard W. Potts, the report carries the unwieldy but self-descriptive title, “Clients perceptions of how reorientation therapy and self-help can promote changes in sexual orientation.” While the title describes what the authors meant to show — how clients describe the benefits of reparative therapy — the report itself actually illustrates something very different: the ex-gay movement’s remarkable ability to instill an almost robot-like parroting of ex-gay rhetoric among their clients.

Testing the Premise: Is MRSA The New Gay Plague?

The Toronto Star said that a new study “discover[ed] a new strain” of a super-bug “hitting gay men.” Headlines in Britain screamed, “Flesh-eating bug strikes San Francisco’s gay community,” and anti-gay extremists across America spread the alarm that gays were introducing another plague into “the general population.” But there was a small problem with all of this: None of it is true!

Paul Cameron’s World

In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.

From the Inside: Focus on the Family’s “Love Won Out”

On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.

The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing The Myths

At last, the truth can now be told.

Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!

Testing The Premise: Are Gays A Threat To Our Children?

Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.

Straight From The Source: What the “Dutch Study” Really Says About Gay Couples

Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.

The FRC’s Briefs Are Showing

Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.

Review: The Gay Report

When Karla Jay and Allan Young published The Gay Report in 1979, it quickly a favorite source of statistics for many anti-gay extremists. But before you accepts these statistic at face value, you should examine the inner workings of this survey very carefully. What you learn might surprise you.

Daniel Fetty Doesn’t Count

The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.

Marcus Bachmann’s Ex-Gay Problem

Jim Burroway

July 7th, 2011

This is very old news, but it certainly is worth bringing up again now that Rep. Michele Bachmann is mounting a serious campaign to capture the GOP nomination for the presidency. In 2006, the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages ran an extensive profile of Michele Bachmann (via archive.org) just as she was about to be elected to Congress for the first time. The profile delved into Bachmann’s extremist religious and political background, and how her use of anti-gay politics as a wedge issue drove a wedge between Bachmann and her own family — which includes a gay stepsister.

The profile also revealed that her husband, Marcus Bachmann has played an important part in her political and religious development. In the Bachmann’s worldview, the man is the head of the household, and the wife is subservient to her husband. As Marcus Bachmann’s older brother explains it, “He is her godly husband… The husband is to be the head of the wife, according to God.” Michele told one church congregation in 2006 that she pursued her degree in tax law only because her husband had told her to. “The Lord says: Be submissive, wives. You are to be submissive to your husbands,” she is quoted as saying. All of which makes Dr. Bachmann’s views all the more relevant, and the 2006 City Pages report (via archive.org) pertinent:

While Michele Bachmann was rising through the political ranks, her husband Marcus—a lumbering, soft-featured man—was working toward a psychology doctorate and a practice in Lake Elmo. There is an overt Christian theme attached to the practice. “Bachmann and Associates believes in providing all clients with quality counseling in a Christian environment,” reads the mission statement on the business’s website. Some of the listed specialties of the clinic and its counselors include “abuse issues,” “co-dependency,” “men’s and women’s issues,” “shame,” and “spiritual issues.”

But some observers claim that the mission of the practice includes counseling homosexuals in an effort to “ungay” them. “It is absolutely sincere,” adds former school board member (Mary) Cecconi. “They specialize in ‘reparation’ regarding sexual orientation.”

Marcus Bachmann, who is also 50, denies that is part of his clinic’s practice. “That’s a false statement,” he says, refusing to answer any questions that don’t have to do with Bachmann and Associates. “Am I aware that the perception is out there? I can’t comment on that.” Still, Bachmann offers, “If someone is interested in talking to us about their homosexuality, we are open to talking about that. But if someone comes in a homosexual and they want to stay homosexual, I don’t have a problem with that.”

Last November (2005), the Bachmanns attended a “Minnesota Pastors’ Summit” at Grace Church in Eden Prairie. Some 300 religious leaders participated in the event, which was organized by the conservative, antigay Minnesota Family Council. Michele Bachmann was there to lead a session on the gay marriage amendment, while Marcus offered a presentation titled “The Truth About the Homosexual Agenda.”

Curt Prins, a 35-year-old marketing executive from Minneapolis, attended. Prins, who is gay, says he went because he was “curious” and wanted to “understand the language” of the antigay movement. “There was so much bile, I nearly had to leave,” Prins recalls. For Marcus Bachmann’s session, Prins says there were more than 100 people crammed in a room at Grace, and most of the presentation involved stereotypes of gays. “He was saying how homosexuality was a choice, that it was not genetics,” Prins says. “He was claiming there was a high predominance of sexual abuse in the GLBT community. There was no research to back any of this up.” (Marcus Bachmann refused to answer questions about the seminar.)

The climax of the presentation was when, according to Prins, Bachmann brought up “three ex-gays, like part of a PowerPoint presentation.” The trio, two white men and a black woman, all testified that they had renounced their homosexuality. “One of them said, ‘If I was born gay, then I’ll have to be born again,'” Prins recalls. “The crowd went crazy.”

While Bachmann claims that charges that he engages in ex-gay therapy are “a false statement,” he clearly has an interest in the ex-gay movement. In a radio interview last year, he discussed what kind of advice he would give to parents who came into his practice with a child who they feared might be gay. Speaking specifically of those children, Bachmann said:

We have to understand: barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature. We have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps.

Likening gay kids to barbarians who “need to be disciplined” raises all sorts of red flags for the kind of treatment those children might experience based on Bachmann’s advice. Just last month, we revealed the story of five year old Kirk Andrew Murphy who was treated to a draconian disciplining program under the direction of George Rekers. Rekers would go on to hold Kirk up as his most dramatic success story throughout his career. That career, like the Bachmann’s, took a turn towards anti-gay politics in the 1980s when he co-founded the Family Research Council, and then further in the 1990s and 2000s with the ex-gay movement when he served on the Board of Directors and the Scientific Advisory Committee for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Bachmann’s statement indicates that he would favor an approach to gender-variant children that would share similarities to Rekers’s, with all of the potential that has for further suffering and tragedy.

Questions about Bachmann’s practice go beyond the ethical. There are also legal considerations as well, specifically the reported $100,000 in Medicaid payments his practice has taken in over the years. Did U.S. tax dollars go towards financing that scientifically discredited and dangerous practice to “cure” something that is not an illness? Again, we are reminded that Kirk Murphy’s “treatment” by George Rekerswas also paid for by taxpayer dollars through grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. And we also know that, according to Rekers, at least one hundred other children endured similar therapy at UCLA in the 1970s and 1980s, much of it on the government dime.

Today, all major medical, mental health, and counseling organizations oppose ex-gay therapy. In an exhaustive review of the professional peer-reviewed literature, the American Psychological Association concluded (PDF: 816KB/138 pages) that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon” and that “there was some evidence to indicate that individuals experienced harm” from such therapies. If Bachmannis performing ex-gay therapy, either directly or indirectly through the advice he is giving parents, then an investigation into what those Medicaid payments goes for is warranted.

Comments

MattNYC

Of course, this type of information only make Bachmann MORE attractive to the loons who vote in the GOP primaries (and make of a majority of all GOP primary voters). But this should help scare away anyone with half a brain if she’s on the ticket.

TomTallis

Désirée

the ex-gay stuff of her husband probably won’t be too much of a distraction to her base and even to the middle of the road voters. It’s her husband and he’s denying any direct involvement, so anyone trying to taint her has to make a real stretch.

However, the “woman is subservient to her husband” crap went out in the 50s. That statement from her will do far more to damage her chances than anything her husband says about gays. The majority of women, liberal or conservative, just don’t buy that anymore. Plus, any opponent just has to raise the specter of “a vote for Michelle is really a vote for her husband” to ruin her credibility.

Arcturus

So if by some catastrophe Michele was elected president, wouldn’t Marcus be the “real” president if she has to be subservient to him? “Michele honey, I really think we ought to nuke North Korea today..”

This reminds me of the Kennedy election where the country was assuming the Pope would be running the country because Kennedy was Catholic.

kelly

This is terrible reporting. Bachmann has never denied counseling unwanted SSA. We don’t know the exact statement he called “false”. He also clearly explains that he works with people who have unwanted homosexual feelings.

The “barbarians” comment is also wrong interpreted. He was simply referring to kids in general. Barbarian merely means “unrefined” in this situation.

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